A Time To Heal
by Sachiel21
Summary: A hard look at events taking place after Vol. 3 Ch 11 *Spoiler Alert*. Blake is wracked with guilt and the desire for revenge. Yang tries to put up a strong front but is breaking apart on the inside and slips into a dark depression. Can they get through this together? Rated M for violence, swearing, and some sexual content at the end (nothing gratuitous).


**A/N Wow that episode, it gutted me but also made bumbleby a real thing. It's fantastic to see the multitude of writers coming out with fics inspired by that episode, here is my humble contribution. Be warned that this is fast paced, hard hitting, and unpolished. Not much to say except that I needed this, needed to get this out of my system.**

* * *

 _It wasn't supposed to be this way_. That was the only thing going through Blake's mind as she half carried, half dragged her unconscious bleeding partner back to the docks. Adam didn't seem to be following, content with the damage and suffering he already caused.

She spared a glance at Yang, she looked so pale and frail, and her arm… Blake couldn't bear to look. This was all her fault. Adam saw it, saw the way she looked it at her, knew that she was important. Such a stupid mistake. She should have let him finish her off quietly then Yang didn't have to get… No. Blake pushed the poisonous thoughts away, she could see a group of familiar faces ahead, Sun, Neptune, Weiss kneeling by Velvet.

"Help!" She grabbed at her stomach, suddenly aware of the pain there.

Her friends hurried over, and there was a collective gasp when they saw Yang. Blake followed their eyes unwittingly, seeing the bloody stump that remained of Yang's once powerful right arm. She couldn't breathe. Quick strangled gasps escaped her lips as she hyperventilated and lost consciousness.

* * *

Yang woke up bleary eyed to the sight of a white fluorescent light on the ceiling above her. For a moment she was so disorientated that she didn't know where she was. She tried to reach up and rub her head but nothing happened. Curious, she looked down at her body and saw a flat spot under the covers where her right arm used to be. She threw back the sheet and saw thick red streaked bandage at her elbow.

 _No. NO!_

She screamed, a tortured shriek piercing the air. This had to be a nightmare, a twisted fucked up nightmare. She pinched herself hard with her left hand. Nothing happened. She didn't get transported back to her bunk at Beacon with the sunshine flowing through the windows. She was still there, still in the nightmare.

Tears filled her eyes as she began to recall the events that brought her here. Blake screaming out in pain, a masked man retracting his blade from her stomach. Red. Then black.

She sobbed uncontrollably until she was aware of another sensation, arms encircling her shaking frame.

Blake.

Yang only realized now that she was in the same room as her, resting on a bed next to hers before she woke up to her shriek. Blake stared at her with watery tears quivering in her eyes, spilling over with each blink. Yang had never seen her looked so pained before.

"I'm so sorry!" Blake whimpered.

Sorry? The word didn't make sense to Yang at that moment. Why was she sorry? She was the one who rushed in like an idiot and got her arm lopped off. Yang stifled the flow of her own tears and bit her lip.

"Hey Blake do you think I'll look good with a robot arm?"

Blake looked up at her in shock, and then collapsed against her chest in a fit of sobs.

"Ooo, maybe I can get a gun attachment and look like that guy from that Final Fantasy game."

Yang said those things with a smile that did not reach her eyes.

* * *

Vengeance.

Vengeance was the only thing driving Blake as she practiced swipe after swipe with her slashing sword. She would have to get better, better than him, make him pay for what he did to Yang. Her muscles began protesting every movement but she pushed on anyways. Stuck at some military base camp on the outskirts of Vale, what else was there to do? Blake had kept her distance from Yang, she was sure she hated her. How could she not? She was the reason. She was to blame for what happened.

* * *

Yang looked on dully as Ironwood, and an older man with grey beard passed her drawings and designs for a mechanical prosthetic arm. She looked at them but did not see. Ruby was by her side, the only constant in her life lately. Blake hardly came by anymore, doing who knows what, Yang didn't know. Ruby didn't tell her but she heard from Sun that she disappeared a few days ago. Normally something like that would have stoked a fire inside her to find her, to bring her back, but she found that there was nothing now, no spark. Fine, she could run away like she always did.

"-We will have to wait for the surrounding tissue to heal more before we attach the prosthetic. It should take another month. Have you chosen a design for your new arm?"

Yang glanced at the old man. Had he been talking? She hadn't heard a thing he said. The mask was cracking. The mask was shattering.

Yang tossed the designs to the floor. "I don't want a new arm!" she screamed. "I want my old one! We can get it back, it's probably still there! We can reattach it!"

The bed rocked with her attempt to leap out of it but Ironwood and Ruby were holding her down.

"Let me go! I have to get my arm back!"

She shook the bed furiously, and Ironwood discreetly pressed the alert button, sending a group of nurses into her room to hold her down and restrain her legs. She bent the steel bars along her bed with her left hand. The fight suddenly left her as a nurse injected something into her thigh, and all there was a comforting blackness.

* * *

Blake lay with chest heaving and her cheek against the cold hard street. The asphalt was black from the rain.

"Should we kill her?" a gruff voice asked.

"Nah." That voice was unmistakable. It haunted her dreams. "Let her go back to her crippled girlfriend," Adam chuckled.

Tears filled Blake's eyes but she refused to let them fall. _I hate you. I hate you so much!_

She somehow found the energy to limp back to the base camp, licking the wounds from her massive failure. She supposed that she should get patched up at the makeshift infirmary. Maybe she could steal a glance at Yang without her noticing.

Blake walked by her room but she wasn't there.

 _Where was she? Did she get an infection? Was there a complication? Oh no. What happened?_

She ran all the way back to the barracks, ignoring the aches and pains that shot through her body. Blake found Ruby absentmindedly fiddling with Crescent Rose, looking paradoxically older and smaller than she ever did before.

"Where's Yang?"

Ruby took a moment to look tiredly at her before responding. "She had a… Breakdown… The doctors sent her to Patch. It's still safe there. They said it would be good for her to go home and have dad look after her for a while…"

* * *

The sun was shining through the window, but Yang lay unmoving with her eyes open. Why? What was the point? Who was she now that she was crippled and incomplete? She popped a pain med into her mouth. It was earlier than when she was supposed to take it, and she would likely feel it later (dad only gave her one dose at a time since that… incident), but she didn't care. She swallowed the pill with no water, the object roughly squirming down her throat and prayed to forget again.

* * *

A middle aged man with scruffy blond hair streaked with grey and tired looking violet eyes opened the door when Blake knocked on the wooden door.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm Blake. I'm…" Blake paused, trying to find the right word. Were they still partners anymore after what happened? "-a friend of Yang's."

The man looked relieved. "Come on in." He closed the door as she stepped inside. "I'm Taiyang by the way, her dad. I'm glad you came. Maybe you can get her to come out of her room, she refuses to talk to anybody, me or her sister…"

He sighed and Blake only now noticed the dark circles under his eyes. He looked exhausted beyond belief. "I'll try."

She went up the stairs knocked on the door. "Yang, it's Blake."

Silence, then a rustling, and more silence.

"Open up. I know you're in there."

"Go away!" Her voice was muffled from behind the door.

Trepidation gripped her chest, and Blake wondered if this was a bad idea after all. She knocked again and there was only silence. She turned on her heel and made her way out of the house.

* * *

Yang paced the room. She didn't hear anymore knocking, and now she was afraid Blake wasn't coming back. _No you don't need her_ , she reprimanded to herself. _You don't need a flighty girl who can't be there for you._ Then she heard a high pitched squeak from her window sliding open, and Blake was standing in front of her. She could only imagine what she was thinking as she took in her appearance, hair matted, clothes disheveled, she hadn't bathed in days, and her empty sleeve cuff... But Blake only walked up to her, and squeezed her so tight that her chest hurt.

"You look like hell." Blake sniffed, "and you smell." It was a gamble on her part, and it was working as Yang's lips quirked up ever so slightly.

"That kind of rhymes…" she chuckled, but then her expression hardened. "Where the fuck did you go?"

"I… I tried to do deal with some things… I'm sorry I left."

Yang glared at her, no sympathy found in those lilac eyes, storm clouds of emotion whirling against each other.

"So was I. As you can see, I'm doing a wonderful job," Yang said, gesturing with her good hand to her messy room, pill bottles strewn about.

Blake suppressed a sniffle.

"Come on. Let's get you cleaned up," Blake said nodding her in the direction the bathroom.

Normally Yang would have refused such a gesture, but her emotions had been so up and down, and all over the place lately. She hadn't been thinking straight, not since before the incident. What the hell, she thought.

Before long, Yang found herself sitting in a tub filled close to the brim with hot water, Blake gently rinsing her hair out with a plastic pitcher.

Yang covered herself with her arm across her chest, although it was nothing Blake hadn't seen before during their communal showers. She allowed herself to relax a little. Yang hadn't been bathed by anyone since she was a child. She sighed, then sighed again. Eventually her sighs became sobs, her entire body shaking in the bath.

"What am I Blake? What am I if I can't fight anymore? I'm nothing if I can't be huntress, what am I going to do?" she asked desperately.

"Shhhh…" Blake soothed in her ear. "You can still fight, you can still be a huntress…"

She wrapped her arms around Yang's shoulders, not caring that the front of her shirt was getting soaked.

* * *

The days that followed were better. They spent a lot of time together, not talking for most of it which was just fine for the both of them. Going out in public was still a challenge, Yang couldn't stand the stares she got, people seeing but not wanting to see. The nightmares still came. There was a vivid one that visited her every night, Yang waking up in a hospital bed to find that both her legs were gone including her right arm. She'd scream for a solid ten minutes after that one. Blake would get up from the cot she slept on and wordlessly crawl into bed with her, holding her tight from behind.

* * *

One day they were sitting together on her bed with their fingers intertwined.

"I tried to go after him," Blake began. "Adam."

She had broken their unspoken rule and said his name.

"Oh?" Yang tried to sound nonchalant. "How'd that turn out for you?"

Blake paused. "Not well," she said thickly. _Let her go back to her crippled girlfriend._

"I could have told you that," Yang said, trying to keep her anger in check. "That was pretty stupid, what if you got killed? I gave up my favourite arm for you, you know?"

Blake's breath hitched in her chest. "…That's not funny."

"Not many of my jokes are, these days," Yang replied easily.

Blake let out the breath she was unintentionally holding as a sigh. She turned into Yang resting her head on her shoulder, content for a moment before kissing her on the cheek. One kiss turned into another, on her jaw, the corner of her mouth, until finally she cupped her face and kissed gently on her soft parted lips.

"Blake…" Yang whispered.

Blake tilted her head and deepened the kiss, all rational thought thrown out the window.

"Blake," Yang said again, louder this time.

Blake slipped a hand underneath her thin cotton T-shirt, feeling her warm skin with her fingertips.

"Blake, stop." Yang said pulling away. "You're doing this because you feel sorry for me. I don't need a pity fuck."

Suddenly, Blake was livid. She wasn't going to let Adam steal this away too. "I'm not doing this cause I feel sorry for you goddammit!" She brushed a hand through her hair. "I… I love you Yang. I have for a while. Ever since that stupid dance!"

Yang froze, the inner gears of her mind turning ever so slowly. "I love you too," she mumbled.

And that was it. Blake was kissing her, really kissing her. She pulled off her shirt, and Yang tried to cover herself again. She had never been self-conscious about her body before, always so proud, but she was the opposite now. As if in answer to her silent question, gently pulled her arm away Blake said, "You're beautiful." A simple statement, like a fact about the world.

She took off her own clothes and guided Yang's hand to her breast, her hardened nub pressing against her palm. Yang felt a familiar ache between her legs that she hadn't felt for so long, and she wished she still had her dominant hand to touch and caress her. But the thought was quickly lost as Blake kissed her and pulled off her shorts.

She could do this, Blake thought. She could be stronger for the both of them, she could give herself wholly and completely to her, and they could be whole together.

* * *

 _ **Epilogue: 6 months later**_

"You feel that?" Blake asked pressing a kiss to her knuckles.

"Yeah… I do."

The artificial skin felt so real. Yang learned to channel her aura into her new arm, like people often did with their weapons, and it became an extension of herself.

The road was long, the road was tough, but it was okay because two broken people could be whole together.

 _ **End.**_


End file.
